November / December 2025

The Champion of Small

Sam Rabl and the Picaroon design

Stan Grayson

PRECIOUS, shown in an illustration by Irwin Schuster.

IRWIN SCHUSTER

PRECIOUS, shown in an illustration by Irwin Schuster as built and rigged in the 1970s by Sam Radding in San Diego, California, is an 18’ LOA strip-planked Picaroon II designed by Sam Rabl. The design, which Rabl included in his 1947 book Boatbuilding in Your Own Backyard, was a round-bottomed version of the earlier 18’ LOA hard-chined sloop that Rabl had built for his own use and named PICAROON, which gave the name to the design.

A story that made the rounds some 90 years ago told of a young man who built a sailboat and had an adventure. As things developed, he and a pal got a lot more than they bargained for. They set out from Mobile, Alabama, aiming for Key West, Florida, but ran into a bad northerly storm that in two days blew them almost to the coast of Yucatan, Mexico. Bruised but determined, they headed back toward Florida and hit yet more foul weather. Finally, 23 days after they first set out, having consumed all their ham sandwiches and then half a potato per day each, and with a much-diminished supply of water, the lads made it to Florida. They landed first at Fort Myers and eventually reached Key West.

The sparse details of this voyage and what happened next are contradictory. One version, published in the Miami New Times many years later, said the sailor “at the age of 19…built himself a sailboat and singlehandedly found his way from the Atlantic coast of the U.S. to the Bahamas.” Another says the young man and his buddy sailed from Fort Myers to Nuevitas, Cuba, where they “luxuriated” on a beach while the Cuban navy conducted a vain search for them. Yet another version, written by the young man himself to his mother on March 22, 1935, reported that in three days, he and “Ernie” would be sailing to Havana from Key West. There are kernels of truth somewhere in all this, because a membership card survives that identifies one of the adventurers—the writer Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester “Hank” Hemingway—as a member of Havana’s then-notable El Miramar Yacht Club.

Whatever the absence of precise details regarding Hank Hemingway’s adventure, there is no doubt about his boat. He’d built it with the help of his friend and named it HAWKSHAW after a then-popular comic-strip detective, but the design had been dubbed “Picaroon” (petty pirate) by its creator, Samuel Supplee Rabl—and he was a most unusual man.

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